native town, where his progress was so slow that he was removed to
another in Angiers. Here also his career seemed unpromising; and the
only advantage he derived was that of becoming known to the brothers Du
Bellay, one of whom, afterwards bishop of Paris and cardinal, was his
patron and friend through life.
From Angiers he passed to a convent of cordeliers at
Fontenaye-le-Compte, in Poitou. He now applied himself, for the first
time, to the cultivation of his talents, but under circumstances the
most unfavourable. The cordeliers of Fontenaye-le-Compte had no library,
or notion of its use. Rabelais assumed the habit of St. Francis,
distinguished himself by his preaching, and employed what he received
for his sermons and masses in providing himself with books. The
animosity of his brother monks was excited against him: they envied and
hated him, for his success as a preacher, and for his superior
attainments;--but his great and crying sin in their eyes was his
knowledge of Greek, the study of which they denounced as an unholy and
forbidden art. This was perfectly consistent: they were content with
Latin enough to give them an imposing air with the multitude; some did
not know even so much, and, instead of a breviary, carried a wine flask
exactly resembling it in exterior form.
His brother monks annoyed and harassed Rabelais by all the modes which
malice, ignorance, and numbers can employ against an individual, and in
a convent. The learned Budeus[11], alluding to the persecutions which he
was suffering, says, in one of his letters, "I understand that Rabelais
is grievously annoyed and persecuted, by those enemies of all that is
elegant and graceful, for his ardour in the study of Greek literature.
Oh! evil infatuation of men whose minds are so dull and stupid!" They at
last condemned him to live _in pace_; that is to linger out the
remainder of his life, on bread and water, in the prison cell of the
convent.
The cause, or the pretence, of Rabelais's being thus buried alive, is
described as "a scandalous adventure:" but differently related.
According to some the scandal consisted in his disfiguring, by way of
frolic, in concert with another young cordelier, the image of their
patron saint. Others state, that on the festival of St. Francis he
removed the image of the saint, and took its place. Having taken
precautions to hear out the imposture, he escaped detection, until the
grotesque devotions of the multitude, and the rogueries of the monks,
overcame his gravity, and he laughed. The simple people, seeing the
image of the saint, as they supposed it, move, exclaimed, "A miracle!"
but the monks, who knew better, dismissed the laity, made their false
brother descend from his niche, and gave him the discipline, with their
hempen cords, until his blood appeared. We will not decide which, or
whether either, of these versions be true; but it is certain that he was
condemned, as we have said, to solitary confinement for life in the
prison cell.
Fortunately for him, his wit, gaiety, and acquirements had made him
friends who were powerful enough to obtain his release. These were the
Du Bellays already mentioned, and Andre Tiraqueau, chief judge of the
province, to whom one of Rabelais's Latin letters is addressed;--a man
of learning, it would appear, and an upright judge. The letter is
addressed, "Andreo Tiraquello, equissimo judici, apud Pictones," and
commences "Tiraquello doctissime." Their influence obtained not only his
liberty, but the pope's (Clement VII.) licence to pass from the
cordeliers of Fontenaye-le-Compte, to a convent of Benedictines at
Maillezieux in the same province. This latter order has been
distinguished for learning, and deserves respectful and grateful mention
for its share in the preservation of the classic remains of antiquity.
It was, no doubt, more agreeable, or less disagreeable, to Rabelais than
that which he had left; but wholly disgusted with the monastic life, he
soon threw off the frock and cowl, left the convent of his own will and
pleasure, without licence or dispensation from his superiors, and for
some time led a wandering life as a secular priest.
We next find him divested wholly of the sacerdotal character; and
studying medicine at Montpelier. The date of this transition, as too
frequently happens in the life of Rabelais, cannot be determined. He,
however, pursued his studies, took his successive degrees of bachelor,
licentiate, and doctor, and was, after some time, appointed a professor.
He lectured, it appears from his letters of a subsequent date, chiefly
on the works of Hippocrates and Galen. His superior knowledge of the
Greek language enabled him to correct the faults of omission,
falsification, and interpolation, committed by former translators of
Hippocrates; and he executed this task, he says, by the most careful and
minute collation of the text with the best copies of the original. "If
this be a fault," says he, speaking of preceding mistranslations, "in
other books, it is a crime in books of medicine; for in these the
addition or omission of the least word, the misplacing even of a point,
compromises the lives of thousands." Accordingly, his edition of
Hippocrates, subsequently published by him at Lyons, has been highly
prized by physicians and scholars.
Rabelais had less difficulty in restoring and elucidating the text, than
in bringing into practice the better medical system of the father of the
art. He complains, in his Latin epistle to Tiraqueau, at some length,
but in substance, that though the age boasted many learned and
enlightened men, yet the multitude was in worse than Cimmerian
darkness--the many so besotted by the errors, however gross, which they
had first imbibed, and by the books, however absurd, which they had
first read, as to seem irremediably blind to reason and truth--clinging
to ignorance and absurdity, like those shipwrecked persons who trust to
a beam or a rag of the vessel which had split, instead of making an
effort themselves to swim, and finding out their mistake only when they
are hopelessly sinking.--Mountebanks and astrologers (he adds) were
preferred to learned physicians, even by the great.
But his capacity and zeal were held in just estimation by the medical
faculty of Montpelier.--The chancellor Duprat having, for some reason
now unknown, deprived that body of its privileges, or, according to
Nicéron, one college only having suffered deprivation, Rabelais was
deputed to solicit their restoration. There is a current anecdote of the
strange mode which he took to introduce himself to the
chancellor.--Arrived at the chancellor's door, he spoke Latin to the
porter, who, it may be supposed, did not understand him; a person who
understood Latin presenting himself, Rabelais spoke to him in Greek; to
a person who understood Greek, he spoke Hebrew; and so on, through
several other languages and interpreters, until the singularity of the
circumstance reached the great man, and Rabelais was invited to his
presence. This is in the last degree improbable. Cardinal du Bellay, his
patron, was then bishop of Paris, in high favour at the court of Francis
I., and, doubtless, ready to present him in a manner much more conducive
to the success of his mission. The ridiculous invention was suggested by
a passage of Rabelais, in which Panurge addresses Pantagruel, on their
first meeting, in thirteen different languages, dead and living, not
including French. Rabelais, however, pleaded the cause of the faculty of
Montpelier so well, that its privileges were restored, and he was
received by his colleagues on his return with unprecedented honours. So
great was the estimation in which he was held henceforth, and the
reverence for him after his departure, that every student put on
Rabelais's scarlet gown when taking his degree of doctor. This curious
usage continued from the time of Rabelais down to the Revolution. The
gown latterly used was not the identical one of Rabelais. The young
doctors, in their enthusiasm for its first wearer, carried off each a
piece, by way of relic, until, in process of time, it reached only to
the hips, and a new garment was substituted.
Rabelais, having left Montpelier, appears next at Lyons, where he
practised as a physician, and published his editions of Hippocrates and
Galen, with some minor pieces, including almanacks, which prove him
conversant with the science of astronomy. One almanack bearing his name
is pronounced spurious, on the ground of his being made to describe
himself as "physician and _astrologer._" He treated the pretended
science of astrology with derision. This would add nothing to his
reputation in a later age; but, considering the number of his
contemporaries, otherwise enlightened, who were not proof against this
weakness, it proves him to have been one of those superior spirits whose
views are in advance of their generation.
Cardinal du Bellay was sent ambassador by Francis I. to the court of
Rome in 1534, and attached Rabelais as physician to his suite. He
appears to have made two visits to Italy with the cardinal at this
period, but there are no traces by which they can be distinguished, nor
is it very material. It is made a question in one of the most recent
sketches of the life of Rabelais, whether he attended the ambassador as
physician or buffoon. His letters, addressed from Rome, to his friend
the bishop of Maillezieux, furnish decisive evidence of his being a a
person treated with respect and confidence, independently of the known
friendship of the cardinal. They are the letters of a man of business,
well informed of all that was passing, and trusted with state secrets.
He alludes, in one letter, to the quarrels of Paul III. (now pope) and
Henry VIII. It appears that the cardinal du Bellay and the bishop of
Mâcon opposed and retarded, in the consistory, the bull of
excommunication against Henry, as an invasion of the rights and
interests of Francis I. Writing of the pope, and to a bishop, he treats
him as a temporal prince, with the freedom of one man of sense and
frankness writing to another, but without the least approach to levity.
We pass over the gross and idle buffooneries which Rabelais is said to
have permitted himself at his first audience of the pope, and towards
his person. They are too coarse to be mentioned, and too inconsistent
with the probabilities of place and person to be believed. One anecdote
only may be excepted, as not altogether incredible. The pope, it is
said, expressed his willingness to grant Rabelais a favour, and he, in
reply, begged his holiness to excommunicate him. Being asked why he
preferred so strange a request, he accounted for it by saying, that some
very honest gentlemen of his acquaintance in Touraine had been burned,
and finding it a common saying in Italy, when a faggot would not take
fire, that it was excommunicated by the pope's own mouth, he wished to
be rendered incombustible by the same process. Rabelais appears to have
indulged and recommended himself by his writ and gaiety at Rome; and it
is not absolutely incredible that he may have gone this length with Paul
III., who was a bad politician rather than a persecutor. But it is still
unlikely, that whilst he was soliciting absolution from one
excommunication, which he had already incurred by his apostacy from his
monastic vows, he should request the favour of another, even in jest. It
appears untrue that he gave offence by his buffooneries, and was
punished or disgraced. This assertion is negatived by his letters, and,
more conclusively, by the pope's granting him the bull of absolution,
which he had been soliciting for some time.
Rabelais returned to Lyons after his first visit to Rome. After the
second, he appears to have gone to Paris. No credit is due to the
ridiculous artifice by which, it has been stated so often in print, he
got over the payment of his hotel bill at Lyons, and travelled on to
Paris at the public charge. He made up, it is pretended, several small
packets, and employed a boy, the son of his hostess, to write on them
"poison for the king," "poison for the queen," &c. through the whole
royal family. His injunctions of secrecy of course ensured the
disclosure of the secret by the young amanuensis to his mother, and
Rabelais was conveyed a state prisoner to the capital. Arrived at Paris,
and at court too, he proved the innocuous quality of his packets, and
amused Francis I. by swallowing the contents. It has been justly
remarked by Voltaire, that at a moment when the recent death of the
dauphin had taken place under the suspicion of poison, this freak would
have subjected Rabelais to be questioned upon the rack. Other ridiculous
expedients, said to have been used by him, to extricate himself from his
tavern bills, when he was without money to pay them, are undeserving of
notice. There is no good evidence of his having been at any time under
the necessity of resorting to them. His letters from Rome to the bishop
of Maillezieux, of whom he was the pensioner, make it appear that his
mode of life there was frugal and regular. But the common source of all
these impertinent fictions is the mistake, as we have already said, of
confounding an author with his book. Rabelais, the eulogist of debts and
drunkenness, the high priest of "the oracle of the holy bottle," must of
course have been reduced to such expedients! There cannot be a greater
error. Doctor Arbuthnot, who approached the broad humour of Rabelais,
even nearer than Swift, was remarkable for the gravity of his character
and deportment.
Cardinal du Bellay, on his return from Rome to Paris, took Rabelais into
his family, as his physician, his librarian, his reader, and his friend.
It is stated, that he confided to him even the government of his
household; which is itself a proof that Rabelais was not the reckless,
dissolute buffoon he is represented. The cardinal's regard for him did
not rest here. He obtained from the pope a bull, which secularized the
abbey of St. Maur-des-Fosses, in his diocese of Paris, and conferred it
on Rabelais. The next favour bestowed upon Rabelais by his patron was
the cure or rectory of Meudon, which he held to his death, and from
which he is familiarly styled "Le curé de Meudon."
It is not known at what periods or places Rabelais wrote his "Lives of
the great Giant Garagantua and his Son Pantagruel;" to which he owes, if
not all his reputation, certainly all his popularity; but he appears to
have completed and republished it after his return from Italy. The date
of the earliest existing edition of the first and second books is 1535;
but there were previous editions, which have disappeared. The "Champ
Fleury," of Geoffroy Tory, quoted by Lacroix du Maine, refers to them as
existing before 1529. The royal privilege, dated 1545, granted by
Francis I. to "our well-beloved Master Francis Rabelais," for reprinting
a correct and complete edition of his work, sets forth that many
spurious publications of it had been made; that the book was useful and
delectable and that its continuance and completion had been solicited of
the author "by the learned and studious of the kingdom."
The book and the author were attacked on all sides, and from opposite
quarters. The champions for and against Aristotle, who disputed with a
sectarian animosity, equalling in fury the theological controversies of
the time, suspended their warfare to turn their arms against Rabelais;
he was assailed, as a common enemy, by the champions of the Romish and
reformed doctrines; by the anti-stagyrite Peter Ramus, and his
antagonist Peter Gallandus; by the monk of Fontevrault, Puits
d'Herbault, and by Calvin. But the most formidable quarter of attack was
the Sorbonne, and its accusations against him the most perilous to which
he could be exposed--heresy and atheism. The book was condemned by the
Sorbonne, and by the criminal section of the court of parliament.
When it is considered that Rabelais, in the sixteenth century, and in
France, chose for the subjects of his ridicule and buffoonery the
wickedness and vices of popes, the lazy luxurious lives and griping
avarice of the prelates, the debauchery, libertinism, knavery, and
ignorance of the monastic orders, the barbarous and absurd theology of
the Sorbonne, and the no less barbarous and absurd jurisprudence of the
high tribunals of the kingdom, the wonder is not that he was persecuted,
but that he escaped the stake. His usual good fortune and high
protection, however, once more saved him. Francis I. called for the
obnoxious and condemned book, had it read to him from the beginning to
the end, pronounced it innocent and "delectable," and protected the
author. The sentence of condemnation became a dead letter, the book was
read with avidity, and Rabelais admired and sought as the first wit and
scholar of his age.
Some expositors of Rabelais will have it, that his romance is the
history of his own time burlesqued. The fictitious personages and events
have even been resolved into the real. Nothing can be more uncertain, or
indeed more improbable. The simple fact, that of two the most copious
and diligent commentators of Rabelais,--Motteux and Duchat,--one has
identified Rabelais's personages with the D'Albrets of Navarre, Montluc
bishop of Valence, &c., whilst the other has discovered in Grandgousier,
Garagantua, Pantagruel, Panurge, friar John, the characters of Louis
XII., Francis I., Henry II., cardinal Lorraine, cardinal du Bellay. This
fact alone proves the hopeless uncertainty of the question. Passing over
the glaring want of congruity, which any reader of history and of
Rabelais must observe between the personages here identified, how
improbable the supposition that Rabelais should have held up to public
ridicule the sovereign who protected him, and the friend upon whom he
was mainly dependant! How absurd the supposition that neither of them
should have discovered it, or been made sensible of it by others! We
more particularly notice this baseless hypothesis,--for such it really
is,--because it is the most confidently and frequently reproduced.
But, independently of what we have said, there is an outrageous
disregard of all design and probability in the work, which defies any
such verification. The most reasonable opinion, we think, is, that
Rabelais attached himself to no series of events, and to no particular
persons, but burlesqued classes and conditions of society, and even arts
and sciences, as they presented themselves to his wayward humour and
ungoverned or ungovernable imagination. This view is borne out by what
we read in the memoirs of the president De Thou, who describes the
author and the book as follows:--"Rabelais had a perfect knowledge of
Greek and Latin literature, and of medicine, which he professed.
Discarding, latterly, all serious thoughts, he abandoned himself to a
life of gaiety and sensuality, and, to use his expression, embracing as
his own the art of ridiculing mankind, produced a book full of the mirth
of Democritus, sometimes grossly scurrilous, yet most ingeniously
written, in which he exhibited, under feigned denominations, as on a
public stage, _all orders_ of the community and of the state, to be
laughed at by the public."
Perhaps the real secret of his enigmatical book may be found on the
surface, in his own declaration,--that he wrote for the amusement of his
patients, and of the sick and sad of mankind, "those jovial follies (cez
folastreries joyeuses), whilst taking his bodily refreshment, that is,
eating and drinking, the proper time for treating matters of such high
import and profound science."
The charge of heresy, as understood by the church of Rome, could be
easily proved against him; but there appears no good ground for that of
atheism, or of infidelity. He applies texts of Scripture improperly and
indecently, but rather from wanton levity of humour than deliberate
profaneness; and he may have retained this part of his early habits as a
cordelier,--for the monks were notorious for the licence with which they
applied, in their orgies, the texts of Scripture in their
breviaries,--probably the only portions of Scripture which they knew:
allowance is also to be made for the tone of manners and language in an
age when the most zealous preachers and theologians, Romish and
reformed, indulged in profane applications and parodies of Scripture
without reproach. Rabelais was in principle a reformer, but of a humour
too light and careless to embark seriously in the great cause.
No writer has had more contemptuous depreciators and enthusiastic
admirers: his book has been called a farrago of impurity, blasphemy, and
trash; a masterpiece of wit, pleasantry, erudition, and philosophy,
composed in a charming style. An unqualified judgment for or against him
would mislead. The most valuable opinions of him are those of his own
countrymen, since the French language and literature have attained their
highest cultivation. Labruyere, after discarding the idea of any
historic key to Rabelais, says of him, that "where he is bad, nothing
can be worse, he can please only the rabble; where good, he is exquisite
and excellent, and food for the most delicate." Lafontaine, who in his
letters calls him "gentil Maitre Français," has versified several of
his tales, and even imitated his diction. Boileau called him "reason in
masquerade" (la raison en masque). Bayle, however, made so light of him,
that he has not deigned him an article in his dictionary, and only names
him once or twice in passing. This was surely injustice from one who
gives a separate and copious notice to the buffoon and bigot. Father
Garasse. Voltaire has treated Rabelais contemptuously; called him "a
physician playing the part of Punch," "a philosopher writing in his
cups," "a mere buffoon." But these opinions, expressed in his
philosophical letters, were recanted by him, after some years, in a
private letter to Madame du Deffand; and he avows in it that he knew
"Maitre Français" by heart. Voltaire appropriated both the matter and
manner of Rabelais in some of his tales and "_facéties_," and he has
been accused of this petty motive for decrying him. It was discovered,
at the French revolution, that Rabelais was another Brutus,
counterfeiting folly to escape the despotism of which he meditated the
overthrow; and the late M. Ginguené proved, in a pamphlet of two
hundred pages, that Rabelais anticipated all the reforms of that period
in the church and state.
The detractors of Rabelais's book may be more easily justified than his
admirers. The favour which it obtained in his lifetime, and the
popularity which it has maintained through three centuries, may be
ascribed to other causes besides its merits. It had the attraction of
satire, malice, and mystery, which all were at liberty to expound at
their pleasure; and many, doubtless, read it for its ribald
buffooneries. There is in it, at the same time, a fund of wit, humour,
and invention--a rampant, resistless gaiety, which gives an amusing and
humorous turn to the most outrageous nonsense. There are touches of keen
and witty satire, which bear out the most favourable part of the
judgment of Labruyere. The condemnation of Panurge, who is left to guess
his crime, is most happily humorous and satirical, whether applied to
the Inquisition or to the barbarous jurisprudence of the age. Panurge
protests his innocence of all crime: "Ha! there!" exclaims
Grippe-Menaud; "I'll now show you that you had better have fallen into
the claws of the devil than into ours. You are innocent, are you? Ha!
there! as if that was a reason why we should not put you through our
tortures. Ha! there! our laws are spiders' webs; the simple little flies
are caught, but the large and mischievous break through them." There is
in Rabelais a variety of erudition, less curious than Butler's, but more
elegant. His stock of learning, it has been said, would be indigence in
later times: but it should be remembered at how little cost a great
parade of erudition may now be made out of indexes and encyclopedias,
whilst Rabelais, Erasmus, and the other scholars of their time, had to
purvey for themselves.